Why trust anything in ‘Rolling Stone’ ever again?

So here’s my question: Why would a conscientious citizen ever again trust anything published in Rolling Stone? To me, the diligent professors at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism went too easy on the magazine’s reporters and editors.

Rolling Stone’s doomed article about a make-believe gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity house was more than “a story of journalistic failure that was avoidable.” The magazine and its editors made themselves willing, if not downright eager, parties to a hoax — and not a terribly sophisticated hoax at that.

Frankly, it’s getting to where the cultural left’s credulousness about melodramatic tales of victimization quite matches the conspiracy mongering of the right.

But hold that thought.

That nobody’s resigning or getting fired strikes me as the death knell for Rolling Stone’s reputation. More than that, its editors profess themselves “unanimous in the belief that the story’s failure does not require them to change their editorial systems.” They even insist that the article’s author, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, will write for them again.

Anyway, to hear them tell it, the editors’ biggest mistake was bending over backward to protect the tender sensibilities of the “survivor of a terrible sexual assault.” One confessed that “ultimately, we were too deferential to our rape victim; we honored too many of her requests in our reporting. We should have been much tougher, and in not doing that, we maybe did her a disservice.”

Noble sentiments. However, what rape victim? After a four-month probe, the Charlottesville police department concluded there was no credible evidence to support Rolling Stone’s melodramatic narrative. None whatsoever. Although the police chief — clearly pandering to campus political sentiments — conceded that his investigation didn’t prove nothing bad ever happened to “Jackie,” the magazine’s one-and-only source.

Of course no investigation can ever prove such a thing. Only that not a single verifiable element of Jackie’s story checked out. There wasn’t even a frat party on the night of the supposed drunken incident.

Writing in The Daily Beast, Columbia University linguist John McWhorter challenges what he sees as the self-delusions of the sentimental left: “The whole sordid affair has been about something much larger: the idea that the pursuit of justice can be separated from facts; that metaphorical truth can be more important than literal truth.”

That is, that because some girls get mauled at fraternity parties, all self-proclaimed “survivors” should be depicted as martyrs. To dissent is seen as symptomatic of bad faith or worse. Resisting such thinking, whether in Charlottesville, Virginia, or Ferguson, Missouri, can be hard.

Even so, it’s a journalist’s most important job.

Arkansas Times columnist Gene Lyons can be reached at eugenelyons2@yahoo.com.